Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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A few years ago, Erma Bombeck delivered the commencement address at Meredith College in North Carolina. One line from her speech was picked up by the national media and was quoted widely. She warned the graduates never to confuse fame and success. “Madonna is one,” she said. “ Mother Theresa is the other.” Americans, who in the eyes of the world have everything, are still searching. The serious among us are not satisfied (thank God!) only to be Madonna, to be rich (which all of us certainly are on any scale except Hollywood’s. In the midst of the Great Depression, when so many Americans were hurting because they had so little, Will Rogers -- who had seen grinding poverty in other parts of the world – said of America, “We’ll hold the distinction of being the only nation that every went to the poorhouse in an automobile.”) We have so much, so much of what our mothers and fathers dreamed of, and what others in the world would give anything to have. We are now able to prevent many of those childhood diseases which worried our parents to distraction. Those we can’t prevent we can often cure. We have nice homes, nice clothing. (Some of us even have nice bank accounts.) But it’s not enough. We’re still looking. “Money doesn’t buy happiness,” my mother used to say. Perhaps, as a nation, we’ve finally come to that realization.

Jesus is walking through Jerusalem, with his country-boy disciples. They are “ooing and ahhing” at the Temple. It must have been a spectacular building. Forty-six years before Jesus walked there, Herod the Great had begun a major re-construction of the five-hundred-year-old Temple, and now it was utterly splendid, a sight to behold. (It was said in ancient times that if you hadn’t seen the Temple that Herod built in Jerusalem, you hadn’t seen a beautiful building.) What’s left of that Temple today, the Wailing Wall, is still amazing to see.
Anyway – apparently wanting his disciples not to dwell so much on the beauty of the Temple but to think, instead, about what an ugly travesty it had become -- Jesus picks a fight with the sellers of sacrificial animals, and the money changers, on the Temple front porch. He shouts, “You’ve turned my Father’s house into a marketplace.” The Jewish leaders disagree. They boast to him about their Temple. He says, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” (Unfortunate words, as it turned out. Two years later his enemies would mis-quote him and accuse him of being a terrorist -- saying he had threatened to destroy the Temple. But that ‘s a story for later in Lent.) Right now John simply tells us that Jesus was speaking of the temple of his body, which would be torn down and raised up in three days.
Look now at I Corinthians, Chapter 1 (which I just read), where Paul, too, is talking about the cross: the tearing down of the body of Christ. Such a seemingly foolish thing to center on, he says. Such an embarrassment, such a scandal. But, he reminds his readers, in Christ God has made wise what we once thought foolish, and foolish what we once thought wise. The cross is the epitome of that. (Doesn’t it strike you odd, that there should be crosses – instruments of execution – atop our churches? Why not an guillotine, or a hangman’s noose?) But, Paul would insist, the cross belongs there, for the cross is fundamental to everything else. It is not our shame, but our glory and the source of our pride. The only legitimate source. God forbid that I should boast, save in the cross of Christ my king,” Paul says. Isaac Watts, too, understood the centrality of the cross:

When I survey the wondrous cross, on which the prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride.

There are other places (besides the cross), Paul says, where we can search for knowledge, other places to seek truth. You can be like the Jews and look for truth in “signs,” power-displaying miracles. If you want to know what God is like, the Jews said, study those occasions when God has shown himself, his “signs”: study the Passover, the escape from Egypt, the conquest of the holy land. That’s how we know God, they said, by his marvelous and powerful works. But, the Jews said, the cross of Christ certainly doesn’t qualify as a marvelous work of God.. Why, the very thought of it! That God should manifest himself not in power but in humiliation and defeat. That’s why, in the long run, the Jews couldn’t accept Jesus: the cross is a scandal to those who look for God in signs and miracles. Even today.

But the cross is also a problem for “the Greeks,” Paul said. Greeks put their trust in wisdom, sophia. And, in truth, the Greeks had proven themselves quite adept at that. They had developed something they called philosophia, philosophy, “the love of wisdom,” and had turned out the greatest philosophers of all time. Socrates, and Plato and Aristotle, and the rest. If you want to know truth, the Greeks said, think hard. The cross was foolishness to them. It (literally) didn’t make sense.

We are all Jews and Greeks. We seek truth in the revelations of God (like Jews) and in learning (like Greeks). We go to church and to school, and believe in both. But Paul says the cross is something different, something more. The cross offers love and forgiveness. “Did e’re such love and sorrow meet…?” “In the cross,” Paul says in another place, “God was reconciling the world to himself.” We can study religion, and (if that’s all we do) it can be a loveless, unforgiving thing – something based on rules and laws and minute details. Which, Paul argued, in the long run, doesn’t change people. It may affect their outward behavior, but doesn’t touch their character. We can pursue learning, and it, too, can be loveless and unforgiving. Empty learning. Learning that doesn’t go anywhere, that doesn’t really change people. Someone wrote on the subway wall, “Life is one contradiction after another.” Beneath it, someone else wrote, “No it’s not.” A lot of academic discussions are like that. We don’t need a change of mind. We need a change of heart. Academic pursuits don’t do that, but the cross does.

One man, going over with his counselor (for the hundredth time) a sin he had committed years before, said, “I just can’t forgive myself.” The counselor, who was a Christian, said, “That’s right. You can’t. Only the one who was offended can offer true forgiveness.” That’s what happens at the cross. God, who (after all is said and done) is the one we have offended with our sins, offers forgiveness. Only He can do it. And in the shadow of the cross, in the realization of that unmerited, unconditional, unspeakable love, we move out and up -- away from guilt and shame. That liberation is not something we’ve accomplished but something God has done pro nobis, for us. “Herein is love: not that we love God, but that he loved us, and gave himself for us.”

The problem with the cross is not what it offers but what it requires. It requires some “tearing down.” Forty years after Jesus and his disciples visited Jerusalem, the Temple was destroyed – not by Jesus, of course, but by the Romans. It has never been rebuilt. Today a mosque stands on the site. Religion without love at its center will not last. Learning without redemption will prove empty. “But we preach Christ,” Paul says, “Christ nailed to the cross. To the Jews a scandal, to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks…the power of God and the wisdom of God.”